Winning Over The Values Voters.(Point of View)(America's working class)

When there's a conflict between Americans' pocketbooks and values, most choose the latter.

In Barack Obama's now famous remarks to rich donors in San Francisco in early April, he attributed the fact that white Democrats in small towns were resisting his candidacy to their anger over their economic misfortune. "They get bitter," Obama said, "and cling to guns or religion -- as a way to explain their frustration." Obama seemed to be implying that social conservatism is a toxic byproduct of economic distress--and it may have hurt him in Pennsylvania last week, where he lost the primary contest to Hillary Clinton.

Yet the notion expressed by Obama is hardly new. Way back in 1991, Bill Clinton claimed that Republican appeals to traditional values worked because "you have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death." Indeed there is much currency to the idea that white members of America's working class foolishly vote for values at the expense of their economic interests. But is this thesis correct? The answer, it turns out, is complicated. If the white working class is defined as those without college degrees, then yes, these voters have been crucial to Republican successes since the 1960s. In 1972, Richard Nixon deliberately aimed to "make patriotism and morality the issue and get above the material things." GOP strategists Lee Atwater and Karl Rove later led their party to success by appealing to uneducated voters on the basis of issues like religion, patriotism, gun ownership and opposition to welfare and race-based affirmative action.

But it is far from obvious that by choosing to vote the Republican ticket, such Americans have acted against their economic interests--for it's not at all clear that recent Democrats would have offered more economic help than Republicans did. While U.S. liberals in office have been extremely generous to the poor--by removing them from the tax rolls, enlarging the Earned Income Tax Credit, raising the minimum wage--these reforms have done little for many working-class whites who make too much money to qualify for means-tested antipoverty programs. Instead of promoting plans to raise median wages, which have stagnated since the 1970s, liberals have focused on rolling back tax cuts for the rich--a valid goal, but like universal health care, one that would not raise take-home pay by a penny. By supporting race-based affirmative action, conventional liberals have favored positive discrimination for blacks and Latinos against members of the white working class in college admissions, small-business assistance and congressional redistricting.

Proponents of the thesis that the white working class votes against its interests also err by suggesting that ...